sociology

March 3, 2013

In her introduction to the March 2013 issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion—which features a special forum on prayer—editor Laura R. Olson highlights the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer project as an important stimulant of new interdisciplinary research on this topic:

Our special forum on prayer marks the first in what we hope will be a recurring series of in-depth analyses of emerging issues, theories, and methods in the scientific study of religion. The study of prayer is a growth industry in our field at the present moment. Some scholars are asking how, where, and why prayer is offered; others wonder how it affects those who pray and are prayed for. The Social Science Research Council has undertaken a broad-based project on prayer that promises to stimulate new research crossing disciplinary boundaries and drawing upon a wide range of methods. I might assert that nothing about religion could simultaneously be more personal and more collective than the practice of prayer. Shane Sharp opens the forum by exploring the question of how we react when our prayers go unanswered, basing his analysis on in-depth interviews with people who have experienced intimate partner violence. R. David Hayward and Neal Krause ask how our prayer practices change in older adulthood; they show that we do pray more, and differently, as older adults. To close the forum, Markus Schafer adapts social network theory to determine whether we become more optimistic when close friends and family members pray for us.

Access this special forum on prayer here [Note: Subscriber access is required].

February 27, 2013

What can the study of prayer tell us – about social life, religious institutions and practices, shared and unique concepts of communication, and ethical self-formation? New Directions in the Study of Prayer supports research that seeks to better understand prayer, in its many forms, but that also considers how the varied practices (from the textual to the embodied) associated with prayer may influence broader questions about social and human concerns. This SSRC initiative is thus working to broaden the study of prayer beyond the relatively narrow range of questions that has recently shaped scholarly discourse and interest. Indeed, we have noted that the relatively limited scope of high profile research on prayer reinforces a widely (if implicitly) held view that prayer is of marginal interest to scholars whose work is focused on themes and issues generally deemed more consequential for modern life.

In so doing, the initiative has taken a broad approach to defining prayer, and likewise how it might be understood as an object of study. Prayer is, understandably, defined and described in many ways that impinge, productively, on the disciplines (and tools and theories) used to engage it. As we are well aware, prayer’s boundaries and its distinction from other kinds of activity (meditation, for example) are not always clear. What appears to be a clear and salient definition in the psychological laboratory, for example, may be quite different from the anthropological or legal definitions that are useful and uncontested in other social contexts. An exciting and central part of our program is to engage these linked definitional and disciplinary issues head-on. We thus believe that to produce a more expansive and nuanced body of research on prayer, scholars must develop an enlarged understanding of the variety of disciplinary approaches operative in the study of prayer throughout the academy, and of the distinctive questions, methodologies, commitments, and presuppositions that govern each.

What does it take to pray well, and how does a regular practice of prayer help remake the devotee into a person who has this ability? Our research team asks how prayer skills are linked to wider ethical ideas of human thriving in the Eastern Christian churches, where spiritual transformation through disciplined, embodied practice has long been considered a key purpose of religious engagement. Prayer in these traditions involves a range of sensory registers, whose interplay we investigate through ethnographic research at sites in Russia and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, and North America, within Orthodox churches of Byzantine derivation as well as Coptic and Syriac branches.

By sensory registers, we mean the role of various senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) and sensory stimuli (images, tactile objects, music, the spoken word, food and drink, the smell of incense, the wetness of holy water, the bodily sensations of standing, kneeling, and bowing during prayer) in human attempts to establish contact with the divine. Departing from approaches that take prayer as either a purely mental activity or a matter of unreflected performance, our research demonstrates that prayer is a practice of drawing closer to non-human forces that calls upon and trains the full range of human senses, involving musical, visual, verbal and gestural expression.

Each team member has anthropological training, but brings additional expertise in such fields as ethnomusicology (Jeffers Engelhardt), theology (Angie Heo, Simion Pop), studies of new religious movements (Jeanne Kormina, Daria Dubovka), history (Sonja Luehrmann), and developmental psychology (Vlad Naumescu). Drawing on anthropological work that emphasizes the role of publicly circulating media in training and orienting the human sensorium, the research team investigates how various sensory registers support and reinforce one another in order to move devotees toward the theological ideal of theosis (becoming god-like). Each team member focuses on a particular sensory register: Engelhardt works on sound and musicality within majority Orthodox Christian countries and in the North American diaspora; Heo investigates the use visual images and imaginaries by Coptic Christians in Egypt; Luehrmann focuses on the relationship of written and recited prayer texts among Orthodox lay people in Russia; Naumescu and Pop study the use of gesture, bodily postures, and disciplines such as fasting among Syriac Christians in India and in the Romanian Orthodox Church; and Kormina and Dubovka consider the range of sensory impressions associated with pilgrimage and the veneration of saints in Russia.

We link individual field sites into a comparative, multi-sited endeavor through the use of joint interview and observational protocols and by collecting objects and media samples for other team members. The team will meet for a field workshop in Romania in June 2013 and for a writing seminar in Vancouver in August 2014. The outcome will be a jointly authored book on Sensory Registers in Eastern Christian Prayer.

February 26, 2013

In the aftermath of 9/11, the assumption that adherents of evangelical Christianity and reformist Islam inhabit discrepant, permanently warring publics, has solidified. The dominant narrative is one of mutual antagonism, which positions these religions as foundational in major global conflicts. In Western Nigeria however, scholars have noted new forms of Islamic prayer whose modalities such as all-night prayer sessions, Sunday Services, personal testimonies, and a new emphasis on good and evil bear a striking resemblance to those of Pentecostal Christians, Similarly, evangelicals are engaging in new approaches to prayer and uses of religious space that reveal the influence of Islamic practices. The convergence between the religious practices of these two groups reveals the direct sharing and transfer of experiences in religious practices and evangelizing stratagems. The new forms of Islamic prayer suggest an emergence of “Charismatic Islam” as can be seen in the intensification in (Yourba) Islam of the kind of “all-embracing enthusiasm” (Ojo 2006) normally associated with Pentecostalism.

In this study, I use the case of these new dramatizations of Muslim prayer in order to understand broader questions such as: how does the transformation of Islam, betoken by these new expressions of prayer, help us to understand the shifting boundaries between Islam and Christianity, particularly in ecologies where both remain socially, economically, politically, and ideologically competitive? Further, to the extent that the nascent modalities of worship symbolize or anticipate doctrinal transformation within faiths, how does a study of prayer provide an analytic platform for understanding of critical shifts and tension within and between Christianity and Islam primarily within the cultural contest of Western Nigeria? In a national context in which the state is disconnected from ordinary people’s lives, prayer has become a central element in the rearrangement of personal and inter-personal regimes, and in the composition of ordinary people’s selfhood. Using prayer transfer and imitation, important components of how the two faiths relate in Western Nigeria, I interrogate the role of these emergent forms of Islamic prayer in the deeper transformation of the totality of the religious culture in the area.

To address questions, I will conduct ethnographic research that focuses on close observation of devotional programs and social events among Islamic groups in two Western Nigerian cities: Lagos and Ibadan. My goal is to closely monitor these events to capture the expressions and nuances of the new protocols of Islamic prayer. My work in the field will be supplemented by interviews with participants. The primary data I plan to collect will be supplemented with an analysis of audiovisual material used by Islamic groups for proselytization. Secondary data will come from published books, journal articles, newspaper reports, and religious pamphlets and tracts. The intellectual payoff of this research will be to challenge the ideas of an “economy of political panic” (Last 2007) or “cosmologies in collision” (Kileyesus 2006) that have appeared in mainstream literature. Instead, I will shift the emphasis to a “spiritual economy” (Rudnychyj 2010) in which, even as theological differences remain salient, competing faiths, in their attempts to expand and preserve themselves, frequently cross boundaries to appropriate the other’s devotional and conversionary strategies. In addition, by emphasizing the strategies of mutual influence and appropriation between Islam and Christianity, the research demonstrates the fundamental “instability of the borders” (Larkin 2008, 103; cf. Soares 2006) between these seemingly antagonistic groups, providing deep insight into their modes of adaptation and accommodation.